فصل سوم

THE GIRLS

S1E1

WEST McCRAY:

Girls go missing all the time.

My boss, Danny Gilchrist, had been talking for a while about me hosting my own podcast, and when I told him about May Beth’s call, and about Mattie and Sadie, he urged me to look into it. It seemed a little kismet, he thought, that I was in the area when Mattie died. Still, those were the first words out of my mouth: Girls go missing all the time.

Restless teenage girls, reckless teenage girls. Teenage girls and their inevitable drama. Sadie had survived a terrible loss, and with very little effort on my part, I dismissed it. Her. I wanted a story that felt fresh, new and exciting and what about a missing teenage girl was that?

We’ve heard this story before.

Danny immediately reminded me of why I was working for him, and not the other way around.

DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:

You owe it to yourself to dig a little deeper. Don’t decide what you don’t have before you know what you do. You’re better than that. Get down there, see what you find.

WEST McCRAY:

I left for Cold Creek the same week.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

It broke Sadie, Mattie’s murder. She was never the same after, and rightfully so, but that the police never found the monster who did it, well. That had to have been the final straw.

WEST McCRAY:

Is that what Sadie said?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

No, but she didn’t have to. You could tell just by lookin’ at her.

WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:

There’s been no justice for Mattie Southern.

It’s impossible for residents of Cold Creek to accept that a crime so heinously and chaotically executed would go unsolved. Television has provided their point of reference; after all, on shows like CSI, they’d catch the murderer within the hour, often working with less than what was discovered in that apple orchard.

Detective George Alfonso of the Abernathy Police Department, who headed the investigation, looks like a movie star past his prime. He’s a six-foot-tall black man in his early sixties with short, graying hair. He expresses dismay over the lack of leads, but given the circumstances, he’s not necessarily surprised there are so few.

DETECTIVE ALFONSO:

We didn’t realize we were dealing with a murder, initially. We got a call about a fire and unfortunately, much of the crime scene was compromised by the fire department’s efforts to put it out.

WEST McCRAY:

The DNA evidence they’ve recovered has been inconclusive and in need of a match. So far, there’s no real suspect pool to pull from.

DETECTIVE ALFONSO:

We’ve filled in the gap between Mattie’s disappearance and death as best we can. As soon as we got the call she was missing, we put out an AMBER Alert. We searched the local area and looked into several POIs—people Mattie had been in contact with in the hours before she vanished. They were cleared. We have a single witness who says they saw Mattie get into a pickup truck the night she went missing. It was the last time anyone ever saw her alive.

WEST McCRAY:

That witness was Norah Stackett, who owns Stackett Groceries, the only grocery store in Cold Creek. Norah is fifty-eight, a white, redheaded mother of three grown children, all of whom she’s employed at her store.

NORAH STACKETT:

I was closing for the night when I saw her. I’d just turned the lights off and there was Mattie Southern at the corner, getting into some pickup. It was dark enough I couldn’t tell if it were blue or black, but I think black. I didn’t get a look at the plate or driver either, but I’ve never seen that truck before and I haven’t seen it since. Bet I’d know it if I saw it again, though. Next day, I hear there’s cops all over Sparkling River and I’ll just say I figured she was dead. I just knew. That’s weird, isn’t it—that I just knew? [LAUGHS] Givin’ myself the creeps.

WEST McCRAY:

The girls lived in Sparkling River Estates. It’s a small park, no more than ten trailers to it, some better kept than others. Cute little lawn ornaments and flower beds adorn one, while a rotting couch surrounded by garbage accents another. There’s no sparkling river nearby, but if you follow the highway out of town, you might come across one.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s managed by May Beth Foster, the girls’ surrogate grandmother. She shows me the girls’ trailer, a double-wide, exactly as Sadie left it. May Beth has found herself in a suspended state of grief where she can’t bring herself to clean it out, even though she also can’t afford not to rent it.

I don’t know what I’m expecting when I step inside, but the place is spare and clean. For the last four years of their lives, Sadie raised Mattie here on her own, but still—she was a teenager and when I think of teenagers, I think of some sort of natural disaster; a tornado moving from room to room, leaving carnage in its wake.

It was nothing like that in the place they called home. There are still cups in the kitchen sink and on the coffee table in front of the old television in the living room. A calendar on the fridge that hasn’t been flipped since June, when Sadie disappeared.

Things get downright eerie in their bedrooms. Mattie’s room looks like it’s waiting for her to come back. There are clothes on the floor, the bed is unmade. There’s an empty glass with water stains coating its inside on the nightstand.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Sadie wouldn’t let anyone touch it.

WEST McCRAY:

It’s a direct contrast to Sadie’s room, which looks like it knows she’s never coming back. In her room, the bed has been neatly made, but aside from that, every available surface is bare. It appears to have been stripped clean.

WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]:

There’s nothing here.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

I found all her things in the Dumpster back of the lot, the day I realized she was gone.

WEST McCRAY:

What kinds of things?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

She got rid of her books, movies, clothes … just everything.

It makes me sick to think about her throwing her life in the garbage like that because that’s what it amounts to. Every little bit that made her, everything, was all in the trash and when I found it, I just started to cry because she’d … it wasn’t worth anything to her anymore.

WEST McCRAY:

Did you see this coming at all? Did she give you any kind of indication she was planning on leaving?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

That week before she left, Sadie got really quiet, like she was thinking about doing something stupid and I told her whatever she was thinking … don’t. I said to her, “Don’t you do it.” But by that point, I couldn’t reach her about much of anything.

Still, I never imagined this …

I have to tell you, it’s killing me to be in here. I just, I’d really like not to be.

WEST McCRAY:

We continue talking in her trailer, a cozy double-wide at the front of the lot. She has me sit on her plastic-covered couch which squeaks very loudly every time I move. When I tell her that’s not so great for an interview, we end up in her small kitchen, at the kitchen table, where she serves me a glass of iced tea and shows me the photo album she’s kept of the girls over the years.

WEST McCRAY:

You did this?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

I did.

WEST McCRAY:

Seems like something a mother would do.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Yeah, well. A mother should.

WEST McCRAY:

Claire Southern, Mattie and Sadie’s mother, is not a welcome topic of conversation, but she’s an unavoidable one because without Claire, there would be no girls.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Less said about her, the better.

WEST McCRAY:

I’d still really like to hear it, May Beth. It could help. At the very least, it’ll give me a better understanding of Sadie and Mattie.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Well, Claire was trouble and there was no reason for it. Some kids are just born … bad. She started drinking when she was twelve. At fifteen, she was into pot, cocaine. By eighteen, heroin. She’d been arrested for petty theft a few times, misdemeanors. Just a mess. I was best friends with her mama, Irene, since Irene started renting from me. That’s how I come into their lives. You never knew a soul as gentle as Irene. She could’ve had a firmer hand with Claire, but there’s no use in dwelling on that now.

WEST McCRAY:

Irene died of breast cancer when Claire was nineteen.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Before Irene died, Claire got pregnant. Irene was trying so hard to hold on for her grandchild but it wasn’t … it wasn’t meant to be. Three months after we put Irene in the ground, Sadie was born. I’d promised Irene on her deathbed I’d look out for that little girl, and that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve always done because, well—you have any kids of your own?

WEST McCRAY:

Yeah, I do. A daughter.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Then you know.